7149

Captain Winfield Burrows Sifton 1916

Half length in three-quarter profile to the left, wearing service dress and holding a cigarette in his right hand

Oil on canvas, 59.4 x 82.9 cm (23 ⅜  x 32 ⅝ in.)

Inscribed lower right: P.A. de László / LONDON / 1916 II

Laib L7884(102) / C24(24)  Captain Sefton

NPG Album 1915-16, p. 64 where labelled: Canada

Sitters’ Book II, f. 2: Winfield B. Sifton. 8th March 1916.

Private Collection

This work is one of a series of portraits de László was commissioned to paint during the First World War, of officers on leave or prior to their departure to the front. As he could achieve an excellent likeness very rapidly, he was much sought after. This portrait would have been painted in just a few hours. According to the daughter of one wartime sitter, the artist offered to paint portraits for fees as low as 50 guineas, compared to his normal pre-war rate of £400 for a similar size. In 1915 he painted thirty-eight such portraits, almost half  the total of his wartime output of uniformed sitters.

Winfield Burrows Sifton was born 21 January 1890, in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, the second of five sons of Clifford Sifton (1861-1929) and Elizabeth Arma Burrows (1861-1925). His father was a member of the Federal Cabinet, and Minister of the Interior and Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs from 1896 to 1905; he was Attorney-General from 1891 to 1896.

Sifton and four of his brothers signed up for active service at the outbreak of the First World War and he sailed to Britain with the first Canadian contingent in September 1914. He served as ADC at divisional headquarters on Salisbury Plain but was released for health reasons before he was sent to the front. He remained in England and pursued business opportunities buying and selling materials needed for the war effort. Although qualified as a barrister, Sifton focused on a business career, both before and after the war. He was managing director of Thynne, Nicholson and Duncan, an export trade company, and a director of the Export Association of Canada Ltd.

On 30 July 1913, Sifton married Mrs. John Kirwan (née Jean Donaldson) of Essex, New Jersey. She had married her first husband in 1910, at the age of only fifteen, having run away with him from school to do so. Using his legal training Sifton helped with the annulment of that marriage and reportedly he and Jean were married in a motor car by the light of a street lamp, in the presence of a clergyman and two of Sifton’s friends. The couple moved to England, where their daughter Elizabeth was born in 1915, at their address of 31 Grosvenor Street. Jean’s portrait [11227] was completed in May 1916. While in London, Jean met John Victor Nash and filed for divorce from Sifton, this being granted 19 July 1919.

The sitter died 13 June 1928 of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of only thirty eight and is buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto.

KF 2014